Since the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution, industry has struggled to safely conduct plant maintenance and other necessary work within hazardous environments. Prior to the second half of this century, most such hazardous environments involved hazardous chemical agents. Since 1950, such hazardous environments may also involve radioactive agents. Industry is continuously working towards improving equipment and techniques which will make working within such hazardous environments safer.
The nuclear power industry has been especially active in this regard. The problem faced by the nuclear power industry is how to safely conduct maintenance and other necessary work within the large contaminant structures wherein potential sources of radioactivity are typically housed. Work within such contaminant structures requires extensive efforts to minimize dangers to workers from radioactive exposure. In the 1990's, such efforts include the employment of a wide variety of sophisticated equipment to monitor radiation levels within the work area and to monitor the personal radiation exposure of each worker within the work area. Video cameras and radio communication equipment are also increasingly used to allow supervisory personnel outside the area or confining structure to more efficiently monitor and supervise work within the work area.
The use of such sophisticated equipment, however, has led to a number of problems. First of all, the use of the wide variety of sophisticated equipment frequently results in the work area being cluttered with an inordinate number of individual pieces of equipment. This not only presents a physical space problem, but also makes the work area prone to tripping accidents.
A second problem arises from the fact that each individual piece of equipment generally requires its own electrical power and generally requires its own data input and data output cables. This leads to a proliferation of electrical wires and cables strung throughout the work area. All of these electrical wires represent safety obstructions within the work area and make set-up of the various pieces of equipment inordinately complicated, time-consuming, expensive and exposure intensive.
A third problem regarding the use of such sophisticated equipment arises from the fact that typical confining structures have a limited number of electrical outlets. The increasing use of individual sophisticated devices has created a competition for those electrical outlets, not only among the various pieces of equipment, but also between the various pieces of equipment and the electrical tools used by the workers performing the work. It is not unusual, for example, for a worker needing electrical power for his tool to unplug one of the sophisticated monitoring devices within the work area so as to have access to the electrical outlet for his tool.
A fourth problem regarding the use of the wide variety of sophisticated equipment arises from the difficulty in transmitting all of the data from each individual piece of equipment to monitoring stations located outside of the confining structure. Typically, such confining structures have only a very limited number of "penetration ports" through which electrical wires and cables can be run between the inside and the outside of the confining structure. As the number of sophisticated pieces of equipment within the work area has proliferated, the difficulty in transmitting all of the data from all of these pieces of equipment to outside the confining area has increased.
Accordingly, there is a need for improved techniques and equipment for maintaining the safety of workers within a confined hazardous area which avoid the above-described problems in the prior art--in an efficient and inexpensive manner.